The conventional approach to editing media material involves periodically halting work on the editing procedure, and conducting a preview of edited material which has been compiled thus far. After the preview, the user continues to compose the edit, cycling through the aforementioned procedure as many times as is desired. It is thus difficult and inconvenient for the user to gain a real appreciation of the result of an edit operation during compilation of the editing itself.
Exacerbating this situation is the fact that as archives of data content increase in size, it becomes progressively more difficult to browse and search such collections. This is particularly pertinent when considering multi-media content, and more so in the context of finding and extracting suitable material for editing and compilation into ordered presentations. Conventional browsers typically present a user with either too broad, or alternately too narrow a view of the stored material for convenient browsing and navigation of the material.